Old. Conservative. Christian. In love with my wife, our boys, Texas, America, Western Civilization, and Jesus. Sorry about the decline of newspapers.

May 22, 2017

MAY 22, 2917 / Theodore Dalrymple on secularization and transcendence

THE SECULARIZATION of Europe is hardly any secret. Religion's long, melancholy, withdrawing roar, as Matthew Arnold put it, is a roar no longer, and hardly even a murmur.

In France, the oldest and most important daughter of the Church, fewer than 5 percent of the population attend Mass regularly. The English national church has long been an object of amusement and derision . . .

. . . among the intelligent and educated, and the current Archbishop of Canterbury succeeds in uniting the substance and appearance of utter foolishness, and unworldliness not with sanctity, but the sanctimony.

In Wales, where non-conformist Christianity was the dominant moral and cultural influence, most of the chapels . . . have been converted into private residences by architects and interior decorators. A Welshman is now much more likely to be found in a supermarket on a Sunday morning than in a chapel; the vast outpourings of pietistic writings, both in English and Welsh, now molder into disintegration on the shelves of second-hand booksellers, who themselves are closing down daily.

In the Netherlands, some elements of the religious pillarisation of the state remain: for example, state-funded television channels are still allotted to Protestants and Catholics respectively. But while the shell of religious pillarization still exists, the substance has gone: watching the channels, you would not easily be able to guess which was Catholic and which was Protestant.

Perhaps it is Ireland that offers the most startling example of secularization in Europe because it was a late starter. Late starters, however, are often very apt pupils; they catch up fast, and even surpass their mentors. . . .

For good or ill, God is dead in Europe and I do not see much chance of revival except in the wake of catastrophe. Not quite everything has been lost of the religious attitude, however; individuals still think of themselves as a being of unique importance, but without the countervailing humility of considering themselves to have a duty toward the author of their being, a being inconceivably larger than themselves. Far from inducing a more modest self-conception in man, the loss of religious belief has inflamed his self-importance enormously.

. . . .

For the person with no transcendent religious belief (and that now means the overwhelming majority of Europeans), this life is all he has. He must therefore preserve and prolong it at all costs -- and not only preserve it and prolong it, but live it to the full. Death for him is extinction, the void, eternal nothingness; and however much philosophers seek to persuade us that it is illogical more to fear an infinite oblivion after our death than to regret the infinite oblivion before our birth . . . .

. . . . For most people, living to the full means consuming as much as possible, having as many experiences as possible, and not only many experiences, but the most extreme experiences possible. . . .

. . . .

So long as the Soviet Union existed, Marxism gathered unto itself in its various forms, most of those who sought transcendence in politics. The search for transcendence in politics did not cease, however, with the transformation of the Soviet Union from an ideological state to a secret police mafia state. Marxism was discredited apart from a few academics and aging faithful; the impulse and allegiance transferred seamlessly to other causes.

. . . .

Chief among these was the environment. The threatened cataclysm was not to be brought about any longer by the unbearable contradictions of capitalism, but by the unsustainable destruction of the environment brought about by human activity. As with the final crisis of capitalism, however, nothing but a complete transformation would do; and the more extreme the allegedly necessary changes, the more extremists could pass them off as prescriptions for change; extremists could pose as the saviors of the human race. . . . The beautify of preservation of the environment as a cause is that it is so large that it would justify almost any ends to achieve it, for a livable environment is the sine qua non of everything else.

. . . .

Some people are able to find transcendence is lesser, but still large, causes: such a nationalism, animal rights or feminism. . . . .

(Theodore Dalrymple, The New Vicy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism, 2010, 2011, excerpted from chapter titled "Why Are We Like This (1)?," reparagraphed)